Interview: Raffi Keuhnelian, co-founder of TikTakTo

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1. What is the secret sauce?
It’s hard to put your finger on one specific attribute. Perseverance is key. It also entails taking some risks and having confidence in the project. If you won’t be using your new service or product, it is very likely others might not be either. Work on a concept that you would actually use and would benefit from.

2. How did it help you win?
It helped us overcome long and exhausting research and development periods, putting together the pieces of the puzzle. Once the goal is set amongst the team members, then the energy is spent on engineering the best product, one that would be useful and beneficial for the users. Failure always has a bright side, we usually tend to fear less after the first failure, which in return, makes for success easier once we’ve overcome that fear.

3. What were the alternatives, what did it replace?
It saved us a lot of time and allowed us to be more productive with our energy and time. Being organized is very important in life, especially when launching a new startup. Time management is an art every entrepreneur must excel in. I don’t know of many disorganized and mismanaged entrepreneurs who have successfully launched a business and maintained its growth.

4. What did you learn to do better?
Many things, having better time management, planning ahead and being organized, listening to other people’s feedback and opinions, having a vision for what time may bring based on user behavior. You must be constantly aware of your surroundings and be learning.

5. What does your startup do? What problems does it solve?TikTakTo allows its members to search and find the best online deals, based on search terms, categories or geo-location based daily deals. It basically combines flash deals, search engine for daily deals based on location, and general search for products and deals. By having all these features on one platform, the user does not need to sign up on different e-commerce websites, receive numerous emails, and browse through different channels to visualize and compare online deals. With TikTakTo, the user has all the features of an e-commerce website in one, with practically every product available in its database.

About Raffi Keuhnelian
Raffi Keuhnelian is the co-founder of TikTakTo, an online website and mobile shopping application that seamlessly fetches deals from across the internet and showcases them in one place, offering consumers a central location for all their shopping needs. Previous to his three year’s work on TikTakTo, Raffi co-founded iNexxus.com, a brand strategy consulting firm, serving clients like Corona, Ford and Sony. With a Bachelor of Arts in international relations from Concordia University, Raffi currently resides in Montreal, Canada, where he continues building his marketing and computer science expertise.